Dune Audio Lectures on Primeval Ghosts
Today we are going to talk about the greatest film ever made. That film is Dune. Now, people are going ask which Dune. The new Dune of 2021 or the Dune of 1984? The Dune of 1984 remains the greatest film ever made because the Dune of 2021 is only 50% of Doom. This is a fact that has not been made very clear by a lot of the reviews. However, Dune 2021 is an absolute masterpiece. It is by itself one of the greatest films ever made. Now obviously there's a subjective matter in describing what is and is not the greatest film ever made but there are some themes that are highly relevant in the whole structure of Dune. Dune is the story about a chosen messianic leader, a leader chosen by fate to change the universe. It has very powerful themes that are related to today. Paul Atreides ends up working with the Fremen, a people in touch with the earth, in touch with the environment. And it's a very complicated plot which we are going to summarize in detail here but to make a long story short, he ends up working with the Fremen and overthrows and smashes an evil empire that is not respecting the environment. It is a film directly connected to spiritual self-awareness to spiritual focus and other very important themes in world history.
The original 1984 film got a rather bad press in our view very unfairly. It was poorly marketed but it still remains a masterpiece. Now the new film is absolutely brilliant, absolutely brilliant and if it were ever completed it could be greater than the 1984 film but we really can't evaluate it until the other half of the film is made but it is it is absolutely brilliantly done. It captures the supernatural vibe of the original film...perhaps might even surpass it but it's very frustrating that it was not completed.
Now part of this is a story of how modern corporate business ownership can interfere with creativity. An example of a triumph of creativity over greed and short-term thinking is New Line Cinemas production of Lord of the Rings. New Line Cinema took an enormous financial gamble by producing all three movies at once. This is what should've been done with Dune. Unfortunately a lot of corporate nonsense got in the way here.
Dune is produced by Legendary Pictures which was bought and is now a subsidiary of the Chinese Wanda Group, the conglomerate which is involved in all sorts of different stuff. So we wonder was Wanda's involvement in all these other activities a reason for not funding the completion of the film when it was shot, which would by the way be much less expensive than what they're going to try to do now...assuming they agreed to restart production in late 2022.
Further problems come from the fact it is distributed by Warner Communications. Now Warner was bought out in one of the dumbest mergers in American business history and this took skill, by AT&T on the grounds there was going to be this marvelous synergy etc. etc. with their cell phone business and AT&T loaded itself up with a giant truckload of debt. Now just in the last year or so AT&T's new executive had to admit the whole thing was a big blunder and now they're spinning it off into some new thing that the fees for which will make millions for Wall Street. Whether this does anybody any good...who knows...but that could be a second problem here. However, the film is still worth seeing, it is still worth seeing and you should definitely check it out but you should if you have not seen the 1984 film you should see it because that is the complete Dune and highly relevant as we say to today, of a messianic leader who sweeps away a rotting political order and brings it into harmony with the environment.
We are going to talk about political allegories in the novel and the film Dune, particularly in terms of the new 2021 version of the first half of Dune that has been released. Dune is an enormously important book because it sets a political...and if you will...religious allegory about our world. Now the question is what is that allegory and how it is going to be interpreted? The allegory is the emergence of a political Messiah, a political dictator who is spiritually tuned into God, who is spiritually in harmony with nature, who is against an evil empire that is destroying nature, is destroying the environment, and the hero in Dune perfects his spirituality and gains power to lead spiritually aware people (the Fremen) to overthrow the greatest empire in the universe.
Connections to the Political Landscape of USA in 2021
Now in looking at that, in 2021 which is quite a while after the time that Frank Herbert wrote the book, you see an analogy in today's world. You see an evil empire, America. You see an evil empire that is totally at odds with any kind of environmental or spiritual sanity. You see an evil empire that is involved in the wholesale destruction of the planet. Now you look at American history you see a total disconnect between any concept of living in harmony with the earth. The American imperialists exterminated most of the native inhabitants who did at least have some concept of living in harmony with the earth. The American imperialist today are actually doing a lot worse than the imperialists in Dune because the American system is just falling apart right and left. The question is, What comes next? And this is a subject we have wrestled with for a long time. No one can definitively say for sure, at least we can't definitively say for sure how exactly all this is going to go down, but a logical conclusion from recent events in US history is that again the American so-called progressive movement has failed.
Lessons About America's Failed Progressive Movement from History
World War I
The Progressive movement just doesn't have what it takes to get the job done and this has been a long-term process of failure, a failure of the progressive movement to prevent the plutocrats, the leaders on Wall Street from dragging America into World War I. In defense of the money lords of England that were not one of these people, think the bankers control the world and so on. On the other hand, it is even far sillier to believe that the economic nexus between England and America was not the nexus for the entry of America into World War I. J.P. Morgan for example got his start as a broker for British loans and the Morgan bank was one of the principal organizations funding agitation for U.S. entry into World War I while making enormous loans to weapons manufacturers and ultimately to the British government itself when it started running out of money in 2016.
World War II and the Cold War
So these people cannot be relied upon. They could not be relied upon in World War II. The entire war was completely mismanaged, leading to the needless atrocities of the firebombing of the German and Japanese cities, which would later be replicated in the firebombing of the North Korean city and a viable peace was not made because the progressives Henry Wallace and so on were unable to stop the creation of a new war, the Cold War, which set in motion a whole new level of debt, death and disaster after World War II.
The Aftermath of the Cold War
When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a false sense of security that well this proved the American system was the best and so on and so forth. That has definitively been proven to be absolute nonsense. By now, it all started going wrong, started going wrong on a lot of different levels but it really started going wrong with Bill Clinton, a guy who sold out the principles of the so-called progressive movement and cut deal after deal with Wall Street, which ruined the lives of low income people and which set in motion the long-term decline of the American economy. Now this would be a 300 hour lecture to list all the absurdities and disasters and crimes committed by America since 2001 when they spent $8 trillion on a whole series of wars killing 2 million innocent people and on and on and on the carnage went.
Who Will Be the New Paul Atreides In Our World?Today America is in disasterous shape. It is not realistic to see that the U.S. progressive movement is going to produce the new Paul Atreides for the world. It is not realistic and there very serious problems with this. So we have to look outside the United States, something we have believed for a long time where. That's tough. Europe is a possibility, but who knows. We still believe in Europe in spite of the pathetic nature of modern Europe in spite of the disaster in Germany with this despicable woman Angela Merkel put in charge, who was really a puppet of American imperialism. Fortunately she's gone but her protégé is in charge of the European Union and Germany is in very sorry shape politically right now. So who knows where it will come from but we think Europe is a possibility. This person could also come from someplace else. Who knows? I mean who knows about the ability of China to provide world leadership?
The American Progressive Movement is Not Up To the Job
We are skeptical about where this future Paul Atreides will come from, but who knows? What we would say, though, is that the American progressive movement is almost certainly not up to the job of achieving needed reform. That is a big problems with the US progressive movement in its connection to the intolerant missionary movement of the 19th century. We are not anti-Christian but there's very unhappy aspects about Christianity going back to the time it was put in charge in the Roman Empire in terms of its intolerance of other religions and the nightmare that it created when it was in charge of Europe during the Dark Ages, and they were called the Dark Ages because they were dark ages. It's really not that complicated and within the American so-called left today are equally intolerant views about issues such as human rights and so on. Indeed the murderous aspects of American imperialism, particularly under Obama, were justified by a crusade for human rights. War criminals such as Susan Rice war criminals such as Samantha Power, these people unleashed wave after wave of death and destruction against innocent people. It's also highly relevant that George W. Bush, a reformed alcoholic who became a religious crackpot, reintroduced torture into the world as a legitimate means of foreign policy, something that neither Hitler nor Stalin ever dared do. So these are acts of a deep moral betrayal. There's a deep failure of the progressive movement to deal with this, which is one more reason why we see reform coming from outside the United States. The so-called human rights movement in America is a sham, it's just to force their version of human rights on other people at gunpoint while America itself is a human rights disaster. Has America paid reparations to the Native Americans? No. Has America paid reparations to black Americans? No. And you don't even have national health insurance in America. You don't even have the people in the capital of America having the right to vote. This could be a long conversation but when it comes to human rights in America, America's in no position to hand out any advice on human rights and these people are utterly intolerant. They are absolute megalomaniacs, they only want to force their system on everybody even though it's not working here. This is a level of megalomania that really in many ways surpasses communism and fascism in terms of its desire to conquer the world and kill people who got in its way and so on and so forth. This is also disintegrating from within. It's disintegrating from within and we need to think creatively about who the new Paul Atreides will be. Where this person will come from. What will be their ideology. And how they will come to power.